Sunday, March 30, 2008

Book review: Bates Gill’s Rising Star

Despite all the alarmist rhetoric coming from the Pentagon and a handful of conservative think tanks, war with China is not inevitable, argues Bates Gill in his book Rising Star: China’s new security diplomacy. The key to avoiding conflict ( or making it less likely), he contends, lies in paying closer attention to and understanding Beijing’s interests as a regional power and encouraging it to continue down the road of multilateralism.

Despite all its virtues — and as a counterbalance to the US’ paranoid perspective on the rising giant it has many — Gill’s book barely touches on the Taiwan Strait, which among all the potential sources of war involving China and the US is by far the likeliest. That said, should Washington, Tokyo and others make some of the adjustments Gill hints at in his book, it could be possible to decouple the Taiwan problem from the encirclement issue, which as I have argued before has made conflict resolution in an increasingly militarized Strait a more onerous task than is necessary.*

There are certain areas, such as Beijing's alliances with murderous regimes like Khartoum, where Gill could rightly be accused of being soft, or at minimum too optimistic, but overall his book shows us that being too hard on it may not be any more constructive.

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About Me

Taipei-based Senior Non-Resident Fellow at China Policy Institute @ U Nott, associate researcher at CEFC, ed.-in-chief Thinking Taiwan. M.A. War Studies Royal Military College of Canada, International Diploma in Humanitarian Assistance from CIHC, CX-77 (peacekeeping) Lester Pearson Peacekeeping Centre, B.A. English lit. Deputy news editor and a reporter at the Taipei Times 2006-2013. Intelligence officer for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (2003-2005). I have been published in the Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, SCMP, National Interest, Lowy Interpreter, The Age, Jane’s Defence Weekly, Jane’s Intelligence Review, Jane’s Intelligence Weekly, Jane’s Navy International, Jane’s International Defence Review, the Ottawa Citizen, China Brief, CounterPunch, FrontLine Security, Strategic Vision, Asia Today International, The News Lens and The Diplomat. I was the 2012 recipient of the award for Outstanding Journalism from the Chen Wen-chen Memorial Foundation. I have appeared on BBC, CBC, CNN, VOA, RTI and Al-Jazeera. I use a Nikon D7100 camera. Follow me on Twitter @jmichaelcole1